TORONTO — Canada's foremost SARS experts and researchers met Friday to set priorities and co-ordinate plans for a formidable task: trying to crack the to-date elusive goals of devising a rapid diagnostic test, effective drug therapies and a vaccine for a disease which no one is certain will revisit humankind.

On a brilliant summer day better suited to a cottage than a windowless hotel meeting room, some of the country's leading scientific minds tried to figure out what has been learned about SARS in the whirlwind four months since it first detonated in this country and what remains to be done on the research front.

Whether SARS was a one-off medical crisis, as some experts predict, or will become a seasonal plague, as others contend, this type of research is crucial, said Dr. Alan Bernstein, head of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which called he meeting and is funding much of the work.

With the remaining SARS cases around the globe dwindling to double digits, Bernstein said he wasn't worried this is a case of researchers trying to close the barn door after a disease has escaped.

"The short answer is no, for two reasons," he insisted.

"One is we don't know whether SARS itself is really gone from this Earth or whether it will come back. And I think we need to be ready for the next time.

"Secondly ... this is a tremendous learning experience for us about how do we respond rapidly from a research community point of view."

In some ways, the group is attempting to play catch-up. SARS hit Toronto's health-care system like an unheralded tidal wave in March. Hospital workers and patients fell gravely ill in large numbers and in rapid succession. The system was in complete crisis mode.

The very people who ought to have been devising protocols for clinical trials to see if this or that drug helped lessen the severity of the disease were too busy trying to identify and treat patients and figure out what protective measures would keep health-care workers from getting infected.

"This is the first time we've had a disease like this, that is a new disease that acutely strikes us, causes a large outbreak with a huge impact and then disappears," said Dr. Donald Low, chair of the meeting. "And bang! You're left holding the bag and wondering what happened because you didn't have a chance to bring together protocols in order to get the right clinical samples or to evaluate a certain therapy."

Some studies were undertaken, but others had to be abandoned. By the time the study design had been approved by participating hospitals, the outbreak had been contained and there were no new patients to enrol in trials.

Now researchers are trying to devise rapid tests and vaccines without any sure sense of whether they will have patients to test them on -- a key part of the licensing process.

"We believe that sure, we can have candidate vaccines ready for testing," said Dr. Danuta Skowronski, a respiratory diseases expert from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

"The question for us is: Will we have enough vaccine licensed and ready for administration to people should the next wave occur?"

All this suggests researchers need to figure out a way to react more quickly, on the fly, during a crisis situation, said Dr. Mark Loeb, an infectious disease specialist at McMaster University in Hamilton.

"In an outbreak situation, where we want answers fast, we have to think: How can we streamline this process, but at the same time remain true to all the ethical principles?" Loeb admitted.

"So it's really outbreak research."

Low, who was a key member of Ontario's SARS containment team, agreed.

"One of the things we talked about this morning is that what we should take away from this lesson is we should have in place ... procedures and protocols to deal with this situation the next time it does happen," he said.

"So that you don't have to start from scratch in developing these whether they're treatment protocols or diagnostic protocols. That you can drop them into place and literally in hours have at least a temporary approval to go ahead and do things.''

If such outbreak research rules are devised, several participants said, they need to be flexible enough to be used for other new infectious diseases that will emerge, unexpectedly, from nature in the way that SARS did.

"I view this as a stepping stone to an emerging disease platform," Bernstein said.

"So in some ways it's better that we're not in the middle of a crisis-crisis now, so that we can do things properly."